


Please Don't Kiss the Chickens

by Kathar



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: ACTUAL FLUFF, Domestic, Established Relationship, M/M, also a little metaphorical fluff, backyard chickens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-23
Updated: 2015-08-23
Packaged: 2018-04-16 17:40:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4634304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kathar/pseuds/Kathar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Phil was staring, pop-eyed, at them both, looking like he’d somehow stopped understanding English and was searching desperately for a translator. “Look, they’re not going to be jealous, and they’re not going to be offended. This isn't about betraying the chickens, it's just basic hygiene!"</p><p>"Our girls are clean!" Clint snapped. "You take good care of them. I resent the damned CDC implying anything else.”</p><p>In which domestic bliss on North Bar is threatened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Skye just doesn't get her bosses sometimes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Please Don't Kiss the Chickens

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Washed Ashore](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1831450) by [Kathar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kathar/pseuds/Kathar). 



> Obligatory Chicken Warning: [Chicken Owners Brood Over CDC Advice Not To Kiss, Cuddle, Birds](http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/07/16/423204177/chicken-owners-brood-over-cdc-advice-not-to-kiss-cuddle-birds) (AKA: the original inspiration for this story.)
> 
> This story is a short stand-alone set in the [Washed-Ashore](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1831450/chapters/3933808) 'verse. It should be entirely readable without reading that first. It appeared first on [my tumblr](http://kat-har.tumblr.com/), but like everything Washed Ashore, it's about doubled in size from there to here, including an all-new ending.

“Phil-- what’s this?” Clint said as he stalked into the kitchen that afternoon. He was already turning his smartphone around to shove the screen in Phil's face.

“Your phone,” Phil replied mildly, but Skye caught the excessive casualness in his tone and began to quietly creep away from him at the breakfast table, sliding her Starkpad and her drink with her.

“Cute,” Clint said, in a _you’re lucky you are_ sort of way. “No. This link. That you sent me.”

What the hell was this? Clint had barely gotten in from New York, and Phil'd been a day and a half ahead of him to North Bar. He’d seemed happy enough when he’d gotten into the cottage a half hour ago, taking the time to tip Phil backwards into a lingering kiss before announcing he was heading upstairs to change.

Normally that was the cue that he was giving Phil fifteen minutes to wrap up what he was doing, work-wise, before he pried Phil’s tablet out of his hands and dragged him off for some kind of ramble down the beach with Lucky or other, less PG, reunion-type activities that Skye tended to try not to think about. They’d gotten better over the past months at not having hands all over each other right there in the kitchen in front of God and Skye and Melinda May (possibly because Melinda had very little patience with groping, no matter how covert) but they still seemed to treat any absences longer than a half-day as if they’d gone without for years.

Probably it was because of the way they’d met; huddled up together in the cottage for weeks then forcibly separated for more, and then tossed into this weird new life, split half and half between a tower in New York and a not-as-lonely-as-it-once-was island on the Jersey Shore, globetrotting to village-tending every ten days or so. Bound to have some lingering effects from that kind of muddle. But still-- this kind of snappishness from Clint was new.

And weird.

“Well, if you’d read it—“ Phil huffed, which made it doubly-weird.

“Oh I _read_ it, Coulson." Clint's voice was a low rumble, more Hawkeye than Barton.  If this was what they (the notorious, nebulous they who always seemed to say these things) meant by _the honeymoon is over,_ Skye thought it was a pretty spectacular crash. She found herself eyeing the exits.

"I also _read_ your subject line,” Clint continued, waggling the phone. “Your innocent little ‘this is interesting,’ and the way you didn’t even bother with a goddamn message. Real smooth, _real_ smooth-- have you been taking lessons from Wanda Jackson or something? Jesus, Phil, is this us now? Have we already started passive-aggressing in this relationship? I thought that you had to wait a year for that at least.”

Phil had the grace to wince at that, put down his coffee, and make a plaintive little hand gesture.

“I wasn’t trying to be passive-aggressive, Clint. I just didn’t want to start the conversation out on an adversarial note, that’s all.”

“Good job with that,” Clint said, and Skye snorted despite herself. It earned her a brief, almost shocked, glare from Phil. She buried her nose in her coffee mug.

“I regret that,” Phil replied, which went right into Skye’s growing hoard of non-apology apology phrases, right alongside “mistakes were made” and “it’s unfortunate that the battle took place next to a Sriracha factory”-- all things she hadn’t expected to learn in this job. For a moment she thought that was going to be the end of it, but then Phil took a deep breath and kept right on swallowing his own foot.

“But I think the article is fairly clear and comprehensive,” he said. “And obviously things have gotten out of hand, here, you have to agree about that.”

“Oh! I’m sorry, I’ll try not to mess up your orderly little life anymore. My mistake, I thought I was supposed to be at _home_ here.”

“Clint!” Phil grabbed for his hand, getting one hard squeeze in. “Don’t be so drama--” he snapped his mouth shut on the end of the sentence as Clint started to pull away. “Fuck. Look, I’m not blaming anybody and it’s not you-- it’s not just you, anyway, it’s all of us. All of us, all right? Me, as well, even. We haven't been around as much, so it's natural to be, well, lax. We get to feeling guilty and then we overcompensate and… but it can’t go on this way. The article’s just confirmation that we need to make some changes around here.”

“Changes,” Clint glowered, though he let Phil keep his grip on his hand. “ _Changes_.”

“Yes. Just… just some minor changes, that’s all.”

“Minor to _you_ maybe, but how will it feel to them? You’re turning on your own chickens, Phil!”

Clint gestured wildly at the door with his free hand, as if Phil could see through it to where the betrayed poultry was presumably pining away in their run.

Skye looked with them, confused. Then the full implication of Clint’s words hit her.

“What?” Skye asked, sitting up straight and dropping her phone on the table. “He’s what? Boss? You're what? What about the chickens? What’s wrong with the chickens?”

She turned to Phil, who was starting to look red about the edges. Clint did that to him a lot, she’d noticed-- more than anyone except maybe Tony Stark, and usually for extremely different reasons. This looked more like a Stark-level flush, and that normally meant Skye put an end to the conversation and dragged Phil off (as opposed to Clint-level flushes, which led to Clint doing the dragging.)

But “normal” and any sense of self-preservation were going to take a back seat for a moment, because if something was wrong with the chickens, Skye herself was going to go a little red. They’d grown on her way more than she wanted to admit, the flock of Steves (and friends). On the days she was alone on the island she often found herself taking the laptop out to the chicken run, to rest beside it and code to the background noise of burbles and clucks and Tony the Hen brooding quietly in her box.

"It's nothing dire--" Phil started to reply, but Clint cut him off.

“Nothing dire? Nothing _dire_ , he says. Jesus, Phil, it’s… it’s… anti-chicken prejudice is what it is.”

“But what _is_ it?” Skye wailed.

“This stupid article Phil sent,” Clint growled, and began reading off his phone. “’Don’t kiss your chickens!’”

“Wait—what?” Skye reached out and grabbed the phone from him almost reflexively, staring at the article, discombobulated. Was it from _the Onion_ or something?

“Huh,” she said as the headline hit, because no, not the Onion. The headline might be trying to be funny, but the content was no laughing matter. She read on, muttering out loud as she went. “‘…That's the message from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is blaming a salmonella outbreak on backyard chicken owners being overly affectionate with their flocks.' No but—“

Skye looked up, feeling unaccountably frantic. What the hell did “overly affectionate” mean? (On second thought-- Skye wasn’t sure she wanted an answer to that question.)

“Keep going,” Clint said, grim-faced under his goatee. He crossed his arms over his broad, flannel-covered chest and glared at Phil, as if the man had somehow personally contacted the CDC about the matter.

“’We do not recommend snuggling or kissing the birds or touching them to your mouth,’” Skye read. “Oh come on!”

“Well, it’s not like you two actually _kiss_ the chickens,” Phil started. Skye and Clint looked at each other, then back at him. “Or… maybe we have a bigger problem than we thought.”

Clint shuffled.

“Look, chickens need a little love too. We let Lucky sleep in bed with us-- don’t glare at me, Phil, that one’s definitely you more than me. We’re always petting _him_ , right? Do you want our chickens getting jealous of our dog because we don’t snuggle them the way we do him?”

“Right,” Skye said, and pointed at Clint. “What he said.” Phil raised an eyebrow at her, and she blushed. “They’re _soft_ , Phil,” she protested. “And their feathers are so… so…”

“Fluffy?” Clint supplied. Skye snapped an approving finger at him.

“Fluffy,” she continued.

“That does not explain the kissing,” Phil told them.

“It really really does,” Clint said back. “Have you ever tried kissing a chicken on the top of the head? It’s just… _nice_. Calming.”

“They have such _neat_ little heads, so firm, and they do this little duck,” Skye found herself burbling, half against her will. (Look, it wasn’t _often_ , right? And not every chicken. Just… Doc seemed to like it. And Doc was a nice, friendly chicken, always happy to peck at her feet while Skye worked.) “And they’re just chickens, what if they think we don’t like them anymore, if we stop?”

“Skye it’s… they don’t know what you’re…” Phil was staring, pop-eyed, at them both, looking like he’d somehow stopped understanding English and was searching desperately for a translator. “Look, they’re not going to be jealous, and they’re not going to be offended. This isn't about betraying the chickens, it's just basic hygiene!"

"Our girls are clean!" Clint snapped. "You take good care of them. I resent the damned CDC implying anything else.”

His voice rose as he spoke, and by the time he reached _else_ it was a flat-out yell.

“Whoa!” Skye said. It was very, very still in the kitchen for a moment, Clint heaving deep breaths while Phil and Skye stared at him. (And Phil, for once, _not_ following the up and down motion of Clint’s chest with his eyes.)

“Clint?” Phil asked after a moment, in a soft voice.

Head, shoulders, hips-- every part of Clint slumped in turn, and he ran his hands over his face.

“Sorry,” he muttered through his palms, then looked up and turned them outwards, pleading. “Phil, this is _Tony_ we're talking about, and Doc, and Bucky and... and... okay, maybe a few of the Steves get into the compost now and then and Emily still has that problem, but we're not kissing them _down there_. There's nothing wrong with chicken cuddling, and they like it. What have they done to deserve this?"

Sincerity was oozing from his every pore, like he was about to get down on his knees or something.

Skye found the phrase _please, won’t somebody think of the chickens_ flashing through her brain and slapped her hands over her mouth before it could pop out. Maybe they’d all been getting a touch melodramatic.

"Oh my god, Clint, we're not getting rid of them or never touching them again,” Phil said, sounding scandalized. “You know that’s the last thing I’d let happen to them. It’s… you can’t honestly think that’s what I want, Clint, be reasonab-- uh, think about it.”

Phil's expression was so lost, so openly pleading, that Skye felt her heart begin to crumble despite herself. Even Clint softened a little, chewing on his lip and beginning to look a bit bashful.

“Look… just wash your hands after you fondle the chickens, okay?” Phil reached a hand out to him, placing it palm up on the table. “Please? We don't need you getting salmonella just before we have a...a... world-wide robot apocalypse or something."

“Okay,” Skye agreed, even though it _did_ feel a little like betraying the flock. She looked over at Clint, who shrugged. “I suppose that’s not that big a deal.”

Quiet settled over the kitchen for a moment as they all considered this, and Skye thought maybe the sun streaming in the windows, still thin in the early spring, warmed a little.

“… And don’t let them indoors anymore, of course,” Phil said into the silence.

"That’s in the article too?” Clint asked, matching him nonchalance for nonchalance.

Skye looked down at the phone, nearly forgotten in her hand.

“’We encourage that people live in their environments indoors and poultry stay outdoors,’” she read.

“Exactly,” Phil said encouragingly, sounding like a man who’d finally decided the storm would blow over without taking the roof off. “That shouldn’t be hard. Just a simple matter of finally repairing that damn latch, and—“

“You forgot about something, Mr. Chicken-hater,” Clint told him, still in an elaborately pleasant tone of voice. Skye figured that the look on Phil's face would be about how he'd look if he'd just come back from checking the roof to find that the basement had flooded while he was gone. It was kind of hilariously _done_.

“Clint, for God's sake, this doesn’t mean I hate our chickens, how could I hate our chickens?” Now Phil’s voice was rising, like he and Clint were on opposite sides of an outrage seesaw.  “I was raising these chickens long before you came along and started naming them. They were _my_ chickens first!”

“Damnit, Phil, then start acting like it,” Clint snapped.

“I am!” Phil cried. “I’m also trying to think about what’s best for the rest of the household! I'm not against the chickens, I care about the chickens I-- I don't have to justify myself to either of you, damnit."

"Of course not, boss," Skye soothed him. "But…” She looked between them both and took a deep breath before continuing, hoping she wasn’t about to step on a landmine, “Clint's not wrong. You forgot something."

"What did I forget?” Phil snapped.

“Well first of all, you apparently forgot these chickens became my family when you did," Clint said. Phil’s mouth dropped open, and he made a startled little half-hitched sound, like his lungs had just compressed against his will.

"And secondly," Clint added, so seriously that Skye wondered if Clint had caught the full implications of what he’d said, "you forgot to take into account what Tasha will have to say about this.”

He’d crossed his arms again, resettling himself with a satisfied _so there_ sort of huff, and Skye belatedly started to realize that somewhere underneath all the bluster he was having fun with this.

"Tasha?" Phil asked, looking around like he expected the Black Widow herself to walk in off the porch.

“Bwok,” said a chicken, from somewhere under the table.

"Tasha," Clint repeated, and pointed downwards.

Tasha the hen stalked gracefully out from under the kitchen table and glared up at Phil, puffing up her soft black feathers. He blinked down at her.

“Okay, I know I closed that door. How the hell did you get in here?”

“Well?” Clint asked, looking triumphant. "You honestly think anything you can do is going to keep her out of this kitchen?"

“Um,” said Phil.

“Cluck,” said Tasha, and she wriggled her elegant little chicken butt then flapped up and landed on the table itself. Skye removed her coffee from the table.

Avenger, hen, and Skye all stared at Phil. After a long moment he sighed and rolled his eyes, then nodded.

“Okay. Okay, fine. Keep on cuddling the damned chickens. See if I care. Just wash your hands after petting them. Also, wash your _face_ before kissing me if you engage in ‘human/chicken fraternization,’ Clint, and all chickens _except Tasha_ are banned from the house. Acceptable?”

“Acceptable,” Skye said, because she didn't quite trust Clint to know when to stop needling.

“Bwok,” said Tasha, looking satisfied.

They all looked at Clint.

“Okay,” he said, and then leaned over and kissed Phil, pulling him closer by the open collar of Phil’s flannel shirt. It went on long enough that Skye began to fidget, and even Tasha started to look bored-- which was always dangerous with that hen. The last time Tasha’d gotten tired with her lot in life, she’d wandered onto the Quinjet and next been seen in Bruce Banner’s lab at the Tower, pecking delicately at several exquisitely-balanced sets of glass tubes.

Anything to prevent that, Skye decided, and coughed significantly. Clint smiled against Phil’s lips and pulled away just a little, leaving Phil blinking at him.

“But I still think you’re prejudiced against chickens,” Clint whispered in Phil’s ear, loud enough for Skye to hear across the table, just before he straightened up. Then he kissed Tasha on her henly forehead and swept out of the room, leaving Phil spluttering.

Skye watched him for a moment, as he sat, stunned.

“Boss?” she said at last, “I think that was your cue.”

“Probably,” Phil admitted, still staring after Clint’s ass, “but I have no idea what my line is.”

Which was just proof that even a really smart, hopelessly in love, strategic genius like Phil Coulson could be _awfully_ dense. Skye caught herself sighing at him at the exact same time Tasha tilted her eminently kissable head in a distinct gesture of chickenly disdain. Phil took one look at both of them and rose, leaving the room without another word. He was blushing so hard it was wrapping around the back of his neck.

“Much better,” Skye said to Tasha as she watched him retreat. And indeed it was; Tasha was in the kitchen, her bosses were being disgustingly cute again, and all was right with the world. She settled in to check her email with a distinct feeling of satisfaction.

The first one was from Tony Stark, to Phil, with a cc to her, Bruce Banner, and Clint.

 _Hey_ , it said, without any kind of proper greeting _, so apparently the CDC issued some kind of warning about chickens and salmonella and not fraternizing with your flock. (At least not without a barrier, and-- actually, never mind, you know what? I regret starting that line of thought.) Since certain unnamed Avengers (and I’m not just talking Hawkbird here) seem to have a thing about the chickens the last thing we really want is an Avenger giving some civilian salmonella because he was cuddling the poultry. (NB to BB: query chicken armor to take hen along as a Hulk-soother? Easier to transport than Veronica. Query also Quinjet-adapted coops.)_

_We’re working on a solution. Still in the brainstorming stages, but right now I’m thinking some kind of irradiation-- probably gamma, since we’ve got Bruce here and all and it’s completely safe-- well, safe once we figure out how to apply it to living organisms. Maybe a portable box. Or a ray gun. A chicken gamma gun. I like it. So anyway, we’re gonna need test subjects down the road. Got any spare Steves? (I told you we needed a coop on the balcony, Coulson. I’ll get Pepper to get people started on that.)_

_Anyway, never fear. You’ll be able to kiss your chicks again shortly._

Skye read the email over twice, and wondered when her life had come to this. Less than a year ago she’d been living in a cozy little ramshackle van, merrily hacking into government databases. (Which, sans the van, wasn’t that different from what she’d done last Tuesday, Skye supposed.) She took a picture of Tasha, who was giving her best impression of a demon chicken out of hell (for no real reason, as far as Skye could tell), and sent it off to Tony, adding Melinda May to the cc chain. With any luck, that’d daunt him long enough for her to warn the bosses.

But, she decided as she idly ran her fingers through Tasha’s feathers, she’d give Phil and Clint a couple hours to finish making up before she pointed it out to them. Just to be safe.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to the fabulous [LauraKaye](http://archiveofourown.org/users/laurakaye/pseuds/Laura%20Kaye) for the beta and [Faeleverte](http://archiveofourown.org/users/faeleverte/pseuds/faeleverte) for the cheerleading and encouragement. I hadn't intended to post this on AO3, but figured it'd make a good addition to the [Happy Little C/C Fic Fest](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/happy_little_CC_fest), running now. Go on, read the rules and join the Happy Little C/C Fic Fest! 
> 
> I may have more coming for that later on, as well. It might involve kilts. 
> 
> Comments and kudos all greatly appreciated, obsessively re-read, and occasionally caressed. I occasionally post chickens, bearded Clint and Phil, and tumblr fics on tumblr at the [Washed Ashore](http://kat-har.tumblr.com/tagged/washed%20ashore) tag.


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